Jill Sobule doesn’t lack nerve. Onstage in Nashville for an Earth Day benefit a couple weeks ago, she pointed across the crowd to a tall man in a baseball hat standing near a beer line. She called to the man as she introduced her next song, getting his attention to let him know she was dedicating the number to him.
Her reason: He had been talking loudly through the first 15 minutes of her performance. Her song: a catchy ditty called “Little Guy.” It begins with Sobule whimsically singing the title phrase several times, playfully drawing out the words over a gently strummed acoustic guitar before adding with more drama, “Such a little guy/In such a big body.” By the next stanza, she’s going on about his “little mind,” while in the third segment she concentrates on his “little heart.”
The song, on Sobule’s new Happy Town album, characterizes one aspect of Sobule’s talent: She writes pointed, biting songs that transform anger into humor—albeit a humor that’s sometimes cut with a cruel streak. While younger rockers rail with unfiltered angst to express their feelings, Sobule represents the voice of an intelligent, educated, thirtysomething adult, a woman who couches her rage in caustic sarcasm.
While Sobule also writes tender ballads and unusually urbane story-songs, humor has become her calling card. Her cheeky, double-sided wit first drew national attention in 1995 with “I Kissed a Girl,” a lighthearted look at a first-time same-sex experience. The song became a major radio hit, and an accompanying video achieved “buzz bin” status on MTV, assuring Sobule of a rare level of massive exposure that often turns albums into top sellers and transforms little-known performers into stars. Her music even became controversial, thanks to local radio station Y-107, which decided to air a parental warning prior to playing “I Kissed a Girl.” Not only was the ridiculous warning likely to intensify interest in the words, but it also gave Sobule the kind of publicity usually reserved for Oasis and Madonna.
As a follow-up, Sobule’s label, Lava Records, chose to put out “Supermodel,” a song from the soundtrack to Clueless. The lyrics keenly lampooned the fashion world’s focus on young, wafer-thin models, and the arrangement bopped to a similar combination of bright melody and raw, fuzz-toned guitar. But the single failed to gain the same high-level exposure as her previous hit. Perhaps the record company failed to foresee that MTV might not be as receptive to a critique of the fashion world. After all, MTV showers as much attention on supermodels as any other media outlet. “Supermodel” did not become a big MTV song, nor did anything else by Sobule.
Without another hit, the momentum created by “I Kissed a Girl” skittered to a stop. Subsequent singles received scant radio attention, and Sobule’s album sales stopped at around the 100,000 mark. While that’s more than respectable, it’s not the sales figure the record company envisioned after the first single’s huge success. In retrospect, both Sobule and Lava Records feared that too many people pegged her as a writer of socially aware novelty songs. Only those who heard all of Jill Sobule knew about the tender vulnerability of “Now That I Don’t Have You” or the uncommon character development of “Karen By Night” and “Margaret.”
The disappointment, made even harder to take by the initial excitement, hit Sobule hard. She refused to pick up her guitar for several months, and she found herself hearing songs by other new breakthrough stars and wondering why they’d succeeded where she hadn’t.
She regained her inspiration partly by learning to play drums, she says. The experience changed her songwriting style, leading her to think in rhythms and tempos rather than in chords and melodies. This shift is readily apparent on Happy Town. The opening track, “Bitter,” is set to an archly percussive rhythm track that’s closer in tone to recent works by Suzanne Vega and Los Lobos than to the sprightly melodic structures of Sobule’s previous two albums. Besides the garbage-pail drums, the song includes a repetitive piano track that lends a sweet tension to the song’s tumbling snare-and-bass emphasis.
The unusual arrangement, full of bright ideas that all work in service of the song, underscores Sobule’s productive creative relationship with Brad Jones and Robin Eaton, co-owners of Nashville’s Alex the Great Recording Studio, where Sobule recorded Happy Town and its predecessor. While Sobule’s songs remain overtly tuneful, they’re now driven by clanging, filtered percussion and treated keyboards, and they’re colored by splashes of brass, rough ’n’ fuzzy guitar tones, and blasts of backward tracking.
“Bitter” delves into the feelings of competition and jealousy that Sobule encountered when she began comparing herself to other new female performers who’ve emerged in the last couple of years. The song opens with a scene of her slipping in front of “the other jealous bitches and the bitter, grumbling men”; she then moans about how life is so unfair and sneers that the woman who made it did so because “her breasts were really big.” By the chorus, Sobule catches herself: “I don’t wanna get bitter/I don’t wanna get cruel/I don’t wanna get old before I have to,” she sings. By the end of the song, she’s working on her smile, wishing everyone the best, and acknowledging that the one who made did so because “she was actually pretty good.”
Not every song on Happy Town finds Sobule in such a generous mood. On the aptly titled “Clever,” she displays just the kind of witty, shrewd wordplay her fans expect. The song begins with Sobule reciting her best traits to a lover, telling him that she can be whatever he wants her to be—clever, funny, tender, dirty, kind, trusting. Then she apologizes for breaking his windshield. In other words, she’d tried in every way to please him, and when none of it worked, she got angry.
Sobule gets away with such blatant acrimony partly because of the wry coyness of her voice—she sounds as if she’s sharing a catty joke rather than blasting her adversaries. Her tone fits her sly, intelligent songs, which reveal the skewed mind of a well-traveled woman. She displays plenty of self-awareness in the way she explores her various grown-up neuroses.
Happy Town features fewer third-person character studies of women who lead secret lives or harbor esoteric fantasies—although Sobule constructs a vivid tale of an introspective, withdrawn young woman in “Underachiever.” She also offers a potent put-down of the social and political pressures applied by the Christian right in “Soldiers of Christ,” and she offers a plainspoken song about the vagaries of a relationship in the poignant “Love Is Never Equal,” performed as a duet with Steve Earle.
Ultimately, Sobule’s strongest songs are her first-person accounts, which explore a modern-day woman’s foibles as she searches for love, happiness, and success. She knows that she’s not going to get everything she wants, but with a little humor, she might at least be able to have some wicked fun along the way.
Jill Sobule opens for Duncan Sheik May 2 at 328 Performance Hall.
